Sharif's India visit: PMs of India, Pak to stay away from acrimonious issues

Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif are expected to steer clear of any acrimonious issues during their 'short, courtesy' meeting on the morning of May 27, leaving long-standing disputes to be tackled in later, formal bilateral talks.

Updated on: May 25, 2014, 10:40:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif are expected to steer clear of any acrimonious issues during their "short, courtesy" meeting on the morning of May 27, leaving long-standing disputes to be tackled in later, formal bilateral talks.

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South Block sources told HT that this understanding was reached through back-channel dialogue between New Delhi and Islamabad officials. The invitation to Pak PM Sharif was for the swearing in of his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, marking the end of a long democratic process. " It is an democratic event and should not be viewed through the prism of bilateral issues," wrote top BJP leader Arun Jaitley in his blog.

While Sharif and his colleagues are expected not to make a political issue out of the invitation, the government and the incoming senior BJP leadership is unhappy at deputy national security advisor N Sandhu's public castigation of Pakistan on the terrorism issue in Jammu and Kashmir at a BSF Investiture Ceremony on May 22. Sandhu's address came after India had invited Sharif.

The Pakistan PM will be accompanied by Sartaz Aziz, advisor on foreign and military affairs, Syed Tariq Fatemi, special assistant on foreign affairs and foreign secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhary, and will arrive on Monday afternoon.

Sharif, along with seven other regional leaders, will attend the function and then move to attend the grand banquet hosted by President Pranab Mukherjee the same evening.

The leaders will then have private meetings with new Indian PM Modi at Hyderabad House on Tuesday morning and then depart from Delhi after saying goodbye to President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhawan.

With PM-designate Narendra Modi and the other SAARC leaders facing a serious terrorist threat, it has been decided that airspace over Delhi will be closed for the during the duration of the open air ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhawan forecourt.

After discussions with Defence Ministry it has also been decided that aerial surveillance by an IAF helicopter would be conducted during the ceremony.

The offices on Raisina Hill will observe a half day on Monday.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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